Don't Be Afraid to Break Stuff

I suggest a title edit: "Don't be afraid to break stuff in your local checkout of version-controlled stuff."

Especially with large projects with many dependencies, breaking the wrong thing in the wrong way can screw everything up in ways that end up taking many hours and debugger voodoo to properly put back together again. I see these often enough in production -- I feel no need to give myself more ugly, scary bugs to fix just for the experience.

Don't know about this. In my experience the best way to take fear out of a codebase is to have a rigorous unit testing and continuous build platform. I've got no problem with refactoring but would like to think it has a bit more of a design element to it. Perhaps time is better spent fixing defects - another good way to learn a codebase and a more productive excersise in our time constrained projects.

I'm not sure I agree with the assumption "The main problem with fear of breaking the code is the implicit assumption that any code is really that good to begin with."

Most of the time I work around code because it is a POS that I do not have the time or budget to clean it up. It's fragile but it works, leave it alone until the day it breaks and then it will move from important to urgent and budget will become available.